The present invention discloses systems and methods for facilitating the development of a customizable portlet, facilitating access to content information, and managing an access contract between a client and a data service provider.
Portals provide a secure, single point of access to diverse information and applications that are personalized to the needs of their users. Portals typically provide a variety of services including, but not limited to, Web searching, news, white and yellow pages directories, e-mail, discussion groups, online shopping and links to other sites. Portals are increasingly being used as points to disseminate information particular to a specific industry such as banking, insurance, or computer technology, for example. Corporate portals also often include information relevant to a specific company, such as intranet information, and links to other information sources relevant to the company's business.
Portals, in turn, may comprise a plurality of portlets. Portlets are applications, typically executed or presented in the context of a portal, that perform one or more specific functions. Creating these highly customizable applications that run over a network, however, has traditionally been a difficult and resource-intensive effort requiring many hours of programming and configuration effort. Moreover, the ubiquitous accessibility of the Internet and the popularity of corporate and enterprise portals has increased the demand for portlets whose level of difficulty to modify is low. Users of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have in particular required to endure a prescribed portlet format and difficult user-interface to perform even the simplest tasks. Further, the ability of a user to customize a portlet has been extremely limited, often requiring modifications to be made from a position local to the server or other host computer.
The present invention addresses these and other problems.